Despite the fact that friendships are profoundly important in human life, there is not one major empirical study that gives us a picture of adult friendship as a social institution and as a social psychological process. Using in-depth focused interviews, this research will investigate friendships in the lives of ever-married woman and men, ages 30-45, with a view to understanding (a) the role and function of friends in their lives, (b) the content and process of their friendship relationships, and (c) the ways in which friendships impact upon the marriage relationship. We will seek to understand what changes, if any, have occurred in friendship patterns and/or the affective quality of the relationships as a result of the feminist ferment of the last decade or so. We will want to learn about the ways in which friendship, the ways in which such intimate (non-sexual) relationships outside the marriage may be experienced as a threat, and the ways in which friendships support and/or inhibit traditional or changing role definitions. We will compare the quality, content, intensity and meaning of women's and men's friendships (both single-sex and cross-sex) so that we may understand the differences between them and the implications of those differences for each sex and for the relations between them. We will seek to understand what happens to the patterns of women's friendships once a woman makes a serious commitment to work or professional life. Finally, we will compare working-class and middle-class adults on all these issues--looking at similarities and differences, placing the differences into the context of the different situational realities of each class, and interpreting them through the experience and perceptions of the people involved. In addition to the data suggested by the questions raised above, we will take a friendship history, a history of the marriage relationship, and the relevant socioeconomic and demographic data for each respondent.